Saturday, June 14, 2008

People leaving AIM for Google Talk and Facebook?

Interoperability between instant messaging (IM) clients is something a lot of users have wished for. More specifically, we wish it was standard and provided right out of the box instead of having to turn to third parties such as Adium, Digsby, Trillian, or Pidgin. Yet there seems to be a problem with the concept of interoperability for the companies of the more popular IM clients.

I'm wondering how much the interoperability really matters with the growth of XMPP services through Google and Facebook? I'm personally seeing more and more people who I used to chat with via AIM making themselves available through Google Talk. How about the rest of you, are you seeing your peeps move away from AIM? Maybe interoperability just doesn't matter because we finally have a critical mass of people using XMPP-based services.

I'm Corvida, the writer of the interoperability story on RWW. You make a great point about the growth of XMPP and I can't deny it. However, I was looking at things from a more...mainstream perspective. Not many of my friends even know that Google has it's own IM client. Popular services like Yahoo and AIM are more mainstreamed oriented than Google Talk. For mainstream growth, interoperability matters a lot imo. However, for early adopters and tech savvy users, it won't really matter at all since they would know ways to get around it all.